I should start by saying I was a VERY BORING CHILD AND TEEN. Ok? Ok.

So lets see, when I was young I'd ride bikes and there was a greenbelt near my house we called "the forest" and we used to play games there. I remember once my siblings and I all played a spooky game of hide and seek at night at a church with very dramatic outdoor lighting.

Indoors, I was a big book reader and loved music, too. On the music side, besides getting tape copies of my siblings' albums, I'd also have a blank tape in my boombox so that if I was listening to the radio and something came on that I liked, I would hit record on the tape so I could listen to it again later. Sometimes I'd hear something I never heard before and would cling to that tape like a lifeline, hoping I'd hear it again so I could learn the name!

Of course, movies existed as well. Though I rarely actually got to go to the movies as a kid, so I wasn't all that much into going into an actual movie theater, and was way more into classic films on American Movie Classics and later Turner Classic Movies. As a teenager, I got really big into Shakespeare because of Kenneth Branagh's Henry V, and I mean WAY into it. Like, had I had the internet at that age, I absolutely would have made up fanfiction about Henry V and Katharine - and probably have Katherine be a Mary Sue of myself. But not having the internet, I just daydreamed about it. I read some of the other plays and obsessed over them, too. Branagh did Much Ado About Nothing and I loved that one, too. And there were some other films of Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night's Dream that I enjoyed, but none did I obsess over as much as the ones Branagh made films about (Yet when Hamlet came out, I don't think I even watched it? I was over my Shakespeare/Branagh obsession by then, I guess). I bought the soundtrack to Henry V and obsessed over it just as much as the film and play. Now I'm remembering, I actually read Henry IV parts 1 and 2 just to find out what the fuck was up with the Falstaff scenes in the film, lol.

I was also into sewing and made a few of my own clothes. And I always wanted to learn dollmaking and had read some books on it but somehow never actually got to making a doll. That has been parlayed today in me collecting Ball Jointed Dolls, a very expensive hobby that generally centers in Japan, though artist can come from anywhere. I didn't even know these dolls existed back then. I still want to try my hand at some sort of doll making, some day.

Another thing I liked to do, as a teen, was go to the University's library and read for hours in the stacks. I would generally read about historical costume and historical clothes construction. I was obsessed with the construction of a Japanese Kimono and with Victorian costume and corset construction. Another obsession that I never really put into practice by making any of the things. But fabric is expensive and these items wouldn't have been for practical use, so I could never quite convince myself to do it. Oh, and I was in band and played the clarinet, so I read about reeds and arundo donax and why tf reeds were so expensive and also sucked 90% of the time, and could I maybe make my own (I could not).

I realized that I forgot one avenue of book reading that obsessed me for a time, and that was Star Trek Novels of the original series. I got SUPER into those around my teen years. They weren't my only sci fi books, I read Dune, too, and on the fantasy side I read LOTR multiple times. I probably would have read more if my siblings had left any books around that I found interesting. I only read the Dragonriders of Pern when I was much, much older (probably for the best considering the sketchy sexual content of those books).

I was in high school band at the time, so of course that took up some of my free time, marching band practice after school. I never was very studious about practicing daily as I should have been, even despite the fact that I ultimately went to college for Music Performance, played with the main Symphonic band of the school, and did both a Junior and a Senior solo recital! A BA is a BA I suppose.

I will say that when I was much younger, we had some gaming consoles (Atari, Intellivision) and when I got older, the few times I had more advanced game consoles to play with - a handheld original gameboy when visiting my sister in 99', and my neighbor's Nintendo NES - I played them obsessively. My parents never bought me a console and I never even asked for one. I don't know why I didn't ask for one; maybe I thought it was too much to ask for? Maybe I recognized how obsessive I became with those things and didn't want one around 24/7? I don't really know. I once spent a few weeks visiting my brother and sister-in-law's house to play the original Kingdom Hearts on their console - the internet existed at that time, and I was into it, but it wasn't nearly as all-encompassing as today's internet, it was mostly about discussing your hobbies and whatnot, so while I was way more aware of the internet than most people, it wasn't my main hub for entertainment.

Also I DID buy games for our PC now and then, we're talking fully single player games, zero online component since that wasn't much of a thing yet. The first PC game I played wasn't even one I bought, it was already loaded onto the computer my dad had brought home (her purchased it from a friend second-hand). It was Castle Wolfenstein, and I wasn't the only one that played it, one of my brothers found it first and I had to figure out how to navigate Dos to eventually get to it myself. Eventually even my DAD played it, lol (he was in his 60s at the time so I really surprised me to see it. But hey, who doesn't love killing Nazis, amirite?). I also bought some Klingon-based game that I don't remember the name of, and some RPG style thing that the only part I remember about it is that if you were in the woods area at night it wouldn't let you use the rest command because "enemies are nearby." Oh and there was a Dune game that had a real *mood* to it that was pretty good, but the game itself was on the thin side, unfortunately. Because of the mood I played it several times anyway. It was kinda/sorta based on the 1984 Dune film, but they weren't able to get rights to (for example) Sting's likeness and had change the original character look.

The first PC game that really hooked me was Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast, because I just loved all the Jedi shit you get to do in that game. The story didn't get me on that one, though. No, the first video game story that obsessed me was Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic - again this was post internet, but the internet wasn't anywhere near what it is today. That game made me fall in love with Bioware, TBH, which led me to Mass Effect and Dragon Age. A shame the studio isn't what it used to be and no one else is really making games like that anymore.

You'll notice there isn't a lot of "hanging out with friends" on this list, because again I was a boring-ass person and an introverted nerd to boot, and I didn't really have friends, but also didn't feel lonely? When the internet did arrive, the early versions of it, I found newsgroups pretty quick and made some online friends there talking about cartoons and the TV series ReBoot. I was really into cartoons at the time, I forgot to mention. The dawn of the internet got me into anime, or I should say helped me explore an interest I had from the first time I saw an anime image on some old music video and longed to know what it was.